Anime, Me, and A Very Peculiar Old Show (Reply)

Despite my age, as a small child I watched a fair amount of anime, and in general they were my favorite cartoons (although I had no idea many of them were from Japan, they were merely better than anything else I was watching). The very first cartoon I can remember watching, was when I was around 4 or 5, and was Kimba the White Lion, and a bit later, I watched Astro Boy (which I thought was pretty bad), and Marine Boy (which I loved). Of course, all were dubbed in English, and likely edited.

Recently, while looking up information about when anime first started getting long-term story arcs (a question I still have no clear answer to, other than definitely by the 1980s), I looked up a cartoon I remember particularly loving. In the US, it was called Tobor the 8th Man, about a police officer who was killed, and his mind transferred into a truly awesome robot body, which even when I was less than 10 years old, was something I loved the idea of – to digress a bit, when I learned the term transhumanism in the 1990s, my reaction was "So that's what my oldest and most enduring interest/belief set is called".

In any case, in reading the linked article, I learned why I don't remember seeing much of Tobor the 8th Man - I didn't remember until looking at the link, that the robot body recharged by smoking "energy cigarettes" (which may have seemed like a reasonable idea in 1960s Japan, but today sounds like a covert ad campaign by Japanese cigarette companies), and when US laws regarding portraying smoking on TV changed, the show was dropped, because the protagonist smoking was an essential part of the show. Thankfully, watching that show had no propagandistic effect on me, since (because both my parents smoked), I always found it to be utterly disgusting.